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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> They talk shit about EU innovation and talk up their own dominance

We should make a list of EU innovations that just got acquired by US companies, who conveniently forget.

Ever heard of Google Maps?

Much more useful would be to make a list of all the reasons these innovations keep ending up in the US rather than staying in the EU, and then trying to do something about it. What does it matter how innovative the EU can be if no one in the EU wants to foster and grow those innovations, and if all those innovators are always looking for the first ticket out of there?

First, many innovations are bought by BigTech. Why are BigTech based in the US and not in the EU? Because the EU has more regulations, and the US famously doesn't do antitrust.

Now of course, if you are a founder, you'd rather go make more money in the US. Does that mean that the EU culture is inferior? I don't know. Go ask the average European if they would like to live like the average American.

Sure, the US have BigTech. But the EU has healthcare. Most Europeans wouldn't be proud to sleep under their desk while Musk does what he does. It's a different culture. If your only metrics is how big the biggest tech company is, then the US wins. If the metrics is how happy the people are... well...

"EU has healthcare" - I dare you to depend on public healthcare in poorer EU countries. As someone living in one of those - you go private for everything because by the time you get on the waiting list it will either be irrelevant or get critical. And lets not mention the shit level of care for non threatening conditions.

And this is already spreading to western Europe as well from what I hear from my friends. Giving the aging population situation every health care system is going to start breaking in the next 10-20 years because of how much health care elderly consume and how little they provide to economy.

So for now rich countries have better public healthcare than US. But EU is a very wide term, inequality between EU countries is larger than US states.

And on the point of why most companies gravitate to US - its to access the richest market and leverage their capital pool - EU is not a single market despite the decades of EU efforts, and EU investment into companies is way behind of US, even EU pension funds invest significant funds in the US stock market.

I thought it was mostly the point of startups to be bought like this? EU should stop allowing them to be bought by American megacorps and make sure they cannot use their power and money to not compete on the merits of their product.

That's how buying works. You can conveniently forget who you bought it from, because it's yours now. Google Maps was bought from an australian company BTW.

> That's how buying works. You can conveniently forget who you bought it

Sure. But when you buy an innovation, you can't suddenly claim that you invented it.

> Google Maps was bought from an australian company BTW

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/google-maps-a-swiss-sto...

You're both right ;) Google maps was indeed bought from an Australian company. Or to be more specific, Google bought a company that had a desktop mapping application that they were in the process of porting to the web, the web version was completed after the acquisition, and that was the original Google Maps. The Swiss company in your link was working on a similar project at the same time and got acquired by Google a couple of years later. The Swiss company was in many ways ahead of Google maps at the time and added a lot new technology and features to Google maps, and can to a great extent probably be considered the basis for the success of Google maps, but Google Maps existed before that acquisition.

Interesting!

So that's twice non-US innovation ;-).

Google Maps, famous Austrian innovation on par with pouched animals ;)

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/google-maps-a-swiss-sto...

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